UPDATE: Consuming Culture in 18th &amp; 19th C. (9/30/04; collection)

We have extended the deadline for abstracts for acollection of essays on "Consuming Culture,"originally posted under the working title of"Consuming Culture: The Eating Pleasures and Problemsof Western Modernity," to 30 September 2004.

CONSUMING CULTURE: FOOD FICTIONS AND THE CONSUMPTIONOF WESTERN MODERNITY IN THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTHCENTURIES

Proposals are invited for contributions to acollection of essays on the social functions, culturalmeaning, and changing representations of consumptionin the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The waysin which food and drink, tobacco, caffeine, consumableexotica, and luxury products in general reflected andcontributed to the formation of Western modernity willbe central to this interdisciplinary study. What wasthe role of eating, drinking, and shopping in thegrowing preoccupation with consumption and leisure inthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? How did thesearch for luxury goods redirect discourses of Empire,medicine, or Puritanism? How did food taboos,exoticism, and ecocriticism figure within theircultural fictions, and how were they represented orharnessed in the politics, literature, and arts of thetime? Were debates on the pleasures of the table andthe social roles of food adulteration or eating - andshopping - problems specific to the development ofWestern modernity, and if so, what was the extent oftheir influence on the rising consumer culture as wehave come to know it?

Possible topics include, but are by no means limitedto:- the fiction, architecture, and topography ofconsumption- the erotics of eating- the consumption of leisure and luxury food- exotic food and food taboos- Empire and the commercialisation of consumption- sugar and slavery- colonial eating habits- eating and sociability/snobbery- class distinctions and fashionable meal times- the cultural histories of breakfast, elevenses,luncheon, dinner, supper, &c.- ecocriticism and vegetarianism- religious fasting and campaigns against alcoholism- food and the spectacle: table manners anddecorations, hotel and restaurant architecture,Victorian medievalism and the recreated banquet- eating problems, food adulteration, and their(literary) representations- smoking, drinking, hunting and gender-specificideals of eating- gluttony, hunger, and the cultural fables of theFrench Revolution- food production and distribution- consuming the Great Exhibition- eating/consumption as metaphors in politics,literature, and discourses on (consumer) culture andthe arts